The Flockmaster of Poison Creek Part 19

"Earl, he'll look after your sheep while you're teachin' Joan her books. Stuff her, but don't founder her, John. If any man can fit her up to prance in high society, I'd bet my last dollar you can. You're a kind of a gentleman yourself, John."

"Thanks," said John, grinning a dry grin.

"Yes," reminiscently, with great satisfaction, "Malcolm made the proposition to me, hit me with it so sudden it nearly took my breath.

'Marry him to your Joan when you make a man of him,' he says. I said maybe he wouldn't want to hitch up with a sheepman's daughter that was brought up on the range. 'If he don't he can go to work and make his own way--I'll not leave him a dam' cent!' says Malcolm. We shook hands on it; he said he'd put it in his will. And that's cinched so it can't slip."

When Tim mounted to leave he looked round the range again with a drawing of trouble in his face, as if he searched the peaceful landscape for the shadow of wings.

"I ain't got another sheep-wagon to give you right now, John; I guess you'll have to make out with a tent till winter," he said.

"I'd rather have it," Mackenzie replied.

Tim leaned over, hand to one side of his mouth, speaking in low voice, yet not whispering:

"And remember what I said about that matter, John. Stuff, but don't founder."

"Stuff," said John, but with an inflection that gave the word a different meaning, quite.

CHAPTER XIII

A FIGHT ALMOST LOST

Dad Frazer was not overly friendly toward the young man from Omaha who had come out to learn the sheep business under the threat of penalties and the promise of high rewards. He growled around about him continually when he and Mackenzie met, which was not very often, owing to their being several miles apart. Tim had stationed Dad and his big band of sheep between Mackenzie and Joan, leaving the schoolmaster to hold the frontier. No matter for old man Reid's keenness to have his son suffer some of the dangers which he had faced in his day, Tim seemed to be holding the youth back out of harm's way, taking no risks on losing a good thing for the family.

Reid had been on the range about two weeks, but Mackenzie had not seen a great deal of him, owing to Tim's plan of keeping him out of the disputed territory, especially at night. That the young man did not care much for the company or instruction of Dad Frazer was plain.

Twice he had asked Mackenzie to use his influence with Tim to bring about a change from the old man's camp to his. In Mackenzie's silence and severity the young man found something that he could not penetrate, a story that he could not read. Perhaps it was with a view to finding out what school Mackenzie had been seasoned in that Reid bent himself to win his friends.h.i.+p.

Dad Frazer came over the hills to Mackenzie's range that afternoon, to stretch his legs, he said, although Mackenzie knew it was to stretch his tongue, caring nothing for the miles that lay between. He had left Reid in charge of his flock, the young man being favored by Tim to the extent of allowing him a horse, the same as he did Joan.

"I'm glad he takes to you," said Dad. "I don't like him; he's got a graveyard in his eyes."

"I don't think he ever pulled a gun on anybody in his life, Dad,"

Mackenzie returned, in mild amazement.

"I don't mean that kind of a graveyard; I mean a graveyard where he buried the boy in him long before his time. He's too sharp for his years; he's seen too much of the kind of life a young feller's better off for to hear about from a distance and never touch. I tell you, John, he ain't no good."

"He's an agreeable kind of a chap, anyhow; he's got a line of talk like a saddle salesman."

"Yes, and I never did have no use for a talkin' man. Nothin' to 'em; they don't stand the gaff."

In spite of his friendly defense of young Reid, Mackenzie felt that Dad had read him aright. There was something of subtle knowledge, an edge of guile showing through his easy nature and desire to please, that was like acid on the teeth. Reid had the faculty of making himself agreeable, and he was an apt and willing hand, but back of this ingenuous appearance there seemed to be something elusive and shadowy, a thing which he tried to keep hidden by nimble maneuvers, but which would show at times for all his care.

Mackenzie did not dislike the youth, but he found it impossible to warm up to him as one man might to another in a place where human companions.h.i.+p is a luxury. When Reid sat with a cigarette in his thin lips--it was a wide mouth, worldly hard--hazy in abstraction and smoke, there came a glaze over the clearness of his eyes, a look of dead harshness, a cast of cunning. In such moments his true nature seemed to express itself unconsciously, and Dad Frazer, simple as he was in many ways, was worldly man enough to penetrate the smoke, and sound the apprentice sheepman to his soul.

Reid seemed to draw a good deal of amus.e.m.e.nt out of his situation under Tim Sullivan. He was dependent on the flockmaster for his clothing and keep, even tobacco and papers for his cigarettes. If he knew anything about the arrangement between his father and Sullivan in regard to Joan, he did not mention it. That he knew it, Mackenzie fully believed, for Tim Sullivan was not the man to keep the reward sequestered.

Whether Reid looked toward Joan as adequate compensation for three years' exile in the sheeplands, there was no telling. Perhaps he did not think much of her in comparison with the exotic plants of the atmosphere he had left; more than likely there was a girl in the background somewhere, around whom some of the old man's anxiety to save the lad revolved. Mackenzie hoped to the deepest cranny of his heart that it was so.

"He seems to get a good deal of humor out of working here for his board and tobacco," Mackenzie said.

"Yes, he blatters a good deal about it," said Dad. "'I'll take another biscuit on Tim Sullivan,' he says, and 'here goes another smoke on Tim.' I don't see where he's got any call to make a joke out of eatin' another man's bread."

"Maybe he's never eaten any man's bread outside of the family before, Dad."

"I reckon he wouldn't have to be doin' it now if he'd 'a' been decent.

Oh well, maybe he ain't so bad."

This day Dad was maneuvering around to unload the apprentice on Mackenzie for good. He worked up to it gradually, as if feeling his way with his good foot ahead, careful not to be too sudden and plunge into a hole.

"I don't like a feller around that talks so much," Dad complained.

"When he's around a man ain't got no time to think and plan and lay his projec's for what he's a goin' to do. All I can do to put a word in edgeways once in a while."

It appeared plain enough that Dad's sore spot was this very inability to land as many words as he thought he had a right to. That is the complaint of any talkative person. If you are a good listener, with a _yes_ and a _no_ now and then, a talkative man will tell your friends you are the most interesting conversationalist he ever met.

"I don't mind him," Mackenzie said, knowing very well that Dad would soon be so hungry for somebody to unload his words upon that he would be talking to the sheep. "s.h.i.+p him over to me when you're tired of him; I'll work some of the wind out of him inside of a week."

"I'll send him this evenin'," said Dad, eager in his relief, brightening like an uncovered coal. "Them dogs Joan give you's breakin' in to the sound of your voice wonderful, ain't they?"

"They're getting used to me slowly."

"Funny about dogs a woman's been runnin' sheep with. Mighty unusual they'll take up with a man after that. I used to be married to a Indian woman up on the Big Wind that was some hummer trainin'

sheep-dogs. That woman could sell 'em for a hundred dollars apiece as fast as she could raise 'em and train 'em up, and them dad-splashed collies they'd purt' near all come back home after she'd sold 'em.

Say, I've knowed them dogs to come back a hundred and eighty mile!"

"That must have been a valuable woman to have around a man's camp.

Where is she now, if I'm not too curious?"

"She was a good woman, one of the best women I ever had." Dad rubbed his chin, eyes reflectively on the ground, stood silent a spell that was pretty long for him. "I hated like snakes to lose that woman--her name was Little Handful Of Rabbit Hair On A Rock. Ye-es. She was a hummer on sheep-dogs, all right. She took a swig too many out of my jug one day and tripped over a stick and tumbled into the hog-scaldin'

tank."

"What a miserable end!" said Mackenzie, shocked by the old man's indifferent way of telling it.

"Oh, it didn't hurt her much," said Dad. "Scalded one side of her till she peeled off and turned white. I couldn't stand her after that. You know a man don't want to be goin' around with no pinto woman, John."

Dad looked up with a gesture of depreciation, a queer look of apology in his weather-beaten face. "She was a Crow," he added, as if that explained much that he had not told.

"Dark, huh?"

"Black; nearly as black as a n.i.g.g.e.r."

"Little Handful, and so forth, must have thought you gave her a pretty hard deal, anyhow, Dad."

"I never called her by her full name," Dad reflected, pa.s.sing over the moral question that Mackenzie raised. "I shortened her down to Rabbit.

I sure wish I had a couple of them sheep-dogs of her'n to give you in place of them you lost. Joan's a good little girl, but she can't train a dog like Rabbit."